democrat at all.My study has led me to believe that Hooker's
significance for New England and America was as a preacher
and pastor, as a theologian, and as an architect of the religious
community.I have attempted to explain Hooker's career within
these guidelines and to integrate a consideration of his writings
with a discussion of his activities in the hope that thought and
action might illuminate each other.While Miller disproved the
idea of Hooker as a democratic refugee, he did not give an
explanation of Hooker's reasons for removing to Connecticut.
I began this study in an attempt to discover in Hooker's ser-
mons reasons for his emigration, and what I discovered there
has importance for Puritan and American life on a much wider
scale.His concern for men's troubled minds, for civil harmony,
and for the practice of a meditative, intensive piety has re-
appeared throughout our history, although I have confined
myself to a consideration of his significance for the Puritan
experience.

Hooker's activities seem to me to fall into several phases
which correspond to his cultural and geographic milieu at
any given time.I have devoted successive chapters to Hooker's
education, first pastoral experience, English preaching career,
activities in the Netherlands, settlement in Massachusetts, re-
settlement in Connecticut, and his work in defense of the
New England Way then being formulated in the four planta-
tions known as the United Colonies.My final chapter attempts
to suggest the lines of Hooker's influence through Cotton
Mather and Jonathan Edwards; I must emphasize the term
"suggest," for any attempt to cover a hundred years of New
England church history in a short chapter can scarcely hope
to do more.

A minor warning or two is due the reader at this point. First,
I use the term Puritan within a historical, and hence shifting,
context.In the first part of the study, involving Hooker's
activities in England and the Netherlands, I intend Puritan to
include all those men who wished to reform the Church of

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