Hooker, Thomas (1586  – 1647). The application of redemption, by the effectual work of the word, and spirit of Christ, for the bringing home of lost sinners to God. The first eight books: in which (besides many other seasonable, and soul-searching truths) thereis also largely shewed, I. Christ hath purchased all spiritual good for his. 2. Christ puts all His into possession of all that good that he hath purchased. 3. The sold must be fitted for Christ before it can recieve him: and a powerful ministry is the ordinary means to prepare the heart for Christ. 4. The work of God is free: and the day of salvation, is while this life is last, and the Gospel continue. 5. God calls his elect at any age, but the most before old age. 6. The soul is naturally setled in a sinful security. 7. The heart of a natural man is wholly unwilling to submit to the word that would sever him from his sins. 8 God the father by a holy kind of violence, plucks His out of their corruptions, and draws them to beleeve in Christ. By that faithful, and known servant of Christ, Mr. Thomas Hooker... Printed from the Authors Papers, written with his own hand… London : printed by Peter Cole at the sign of the Pringting-press [sic] in Cornhil, neer the Royal Exchange, 1656. First edition. [46], 451, [1] p.; 18cm. With the contemporary ownership signatures of Edward Morris (1630-1689), Grace Bett Morris (1634-1705), Ebenezer Pierpont (1694 – 1755), Samuel Foxcroft (1735 – 1807), and Lucy Foxcroft (1747 – 1783). The volume has been expertly rebacked; thirteen leaves have been supplied in facsimile, including the endpapers, title, sigs. B^1-4, C^1-2, D^3-4, and Hh^5-8 (pp. 445-451); loss to margin of p. 141/142. ESTC R18255; Sabin 32828; Wing (2nd ed.), H2639

     A very appealing copy of a key work by the great Puritan theologian who founded Connecticut and, some have argued, American democracy. The volume is of the first rarity, with only three copies recorded worldwide: the British Library, Dr. Williams’s Library, and Library of Congress. (The ESTC cites a copy at Yale, but that is due to a cataloguing error.)

     Fleeing the wrath of Anglican Archbishop William Laud, Thomas Hooker emigrated first to Amsterdam then, in 1633, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he assumed the pastorate of the first church established in Cambridge and served on the synods that expelled Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson as heretics. A break with John Cotton over the limitation of suffrage to full church members compelled Hooker to leave the colony in 1636. With John Haynes, the Rev. Samuel Stone,  and about 100 congregants, Hooker founded the settlement of Hartford. John Haynes joined them in 1637, and together they founded the colony of Connecticut. The colony’s charter, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, has been heralded as a foundational document in American democracy and perhaps the first written constitution in the Western tradition. It invested authority in civil institutions, omitting any reference to the King, and extended equal rights to all free men.

     The eight sermons published in this collection, all originally delivered at the First Church in Hartford, had been preached between 1638 and 1641. Composed in the aftermath of the “free grace controversy” of the 1630s, Hooker rewrote the pieces in the 1640s for publication. An abiding concern with the theological divisions of colonial New England underlies Hooker’s compelling prose. As David Parnham notes:

The pages of the book are saturated by sin – its conspiracies and rebellions, its unholy alliance with Satan, the pains for which it is responsible and the sorrows that it occasions, the all-but-endless lengths to which it will go to elude the pursuing posse of Christ, Spirit and conscience. Frequently enough, in the dramas staged by Hooker’s “practical” voice, the power of grace seems to be mismatched in contest with its more resourceful enemy; sin, time and again, is too foxy for grace.

Sin’s most insidious intrusion, Hooker warns, is in the hearts of antinomians who claimed to have received divine assurance of their salvation, saying:

only thus, I must believe it, and you must believe me: I was in trouble and distress about my Sins, and then there was a voice from Heaven, the spirit did witness to me, That Christ was mine, and my Sins were pardoned, &c.

“This is a Spirit of Delusion,” Hooker explains, “the Devil is there.”

     Hooker’s response to the fundamental uncertainty and terror that characterizes the human condition was to advocate on the one hand a profound humility in the face of a wrathful and dreadful God – a self-abnegation so complete that it did not allow for despair, for being convinced of one’s damnation was as egotistical as being convinced of one’s salvation. “Do not set too high a price upon our own performance” he wrote. Hooker balanced this humility by advocating a “preparationist” engagement – one should read the bible, attend worship, meditate, and pray as a means of readying the soul to receive God’s grace. “Dyet thy soul with a daily admiration of this rich Mercy of the Lord, as with thy daily bread,” he counseled. For Sydney Ahlstrom and other scholars, it was a small step from Hooker’s radical humility and engagement to the political sensibilities that distinguished him from the Massachusetts theocrats. What Luther had called “the priesthood of all believers” set the foundation for a democracy of universal suffrage.

     For Perry Miller, “the mighty Thomas Hooker” was “the greatest of New England preachers.” In the biographical sketch that serves as an Appendix to his Magnalia Christi Americana, Cotton Mather compared Hooker to Luther and to St. Paul for his role in shaping the spiritual life of the colonies. The signatures of several early owners testify to Hooker’s readership in colonial New England. These include Edward Morris (1630-1689), a selectman in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and his wife Grace (1634-1705), both of whom were members of John Eliot's congregation; Ebenezer Pierpont (1694 – 1755), who unsuccessfully sued Harvard in 1715 with Cotton Mather’s support; Samuel Foxcroft (1735 – 1807), pastor of the Congregational Church in New Gloucester, Maine, and son of a minister of the First Church in Boston; and Lucy Foxcroft (1747 – 1783), Samuel’s wife.

     An essential volume with superb early New England provenance.

Selected References

• Ahlstrom, Sydney E. “Thomas Hooker: Puritanism and Democratic Citizenship: A Preliminary Inquiry into Some Relationships of Religion and American Civic Responsibility.” Church History 32, no. 4 (1963): 415–31.
• Bush, Sargent, Jr. The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventures in Two Worlds (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, )
• Fender, Stephen. “Edward Taylor and ‘The Application of Redemption.’” The Modern Language Review 59, no. 3 (1964): 331–34.
• Herget, Winfried. “Preaching and Publication: Chronology and the Style of Thomas Hooker’s Sermons.” The Harvard Theological Review 65, no. 2 (1972): 231–39.
• Hodder, Alan D. “In the Glasse of God’s Word: Hooker’s Pulpit Rhetoric and the Theater of Conversion.” The New England Quarterly 66, no. 1 (1993): 67–109.
• Mather, Cotton. The Light of the Western Churches; or, the Life of Mr. Thomas Hooker, in Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England (Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1820), I: 302-319.
• Parnham, David. “Redeeming Free Grace: Thomas Hooker and the Contested Language of Salvation.” Church History 77, no. 4 (2008): 915–54.
• Pettit, Norman. “Hooker’s Doctrine of Assurance: A Critical Phase in New England Spiritual Thought.” The New England Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1974): 518–34.
• Tipson, Baird. Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Winship, Michael P.  Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)