Although Richard Hooker was a representative Elizabethan in the scope of his mind and out look, he so contrived to unite and hold In a real equilibrium a deep sympathy with the three great spiritual currents of his time, that: Low Churchmen, High Churchmen and Broad 4 Churchmen can all find themselves In Hooker' s work today. It is a work that makes topical appeal with the attention now being paid to the work of the World Council of Churches, and the furtherance of the Ecumenical movement. Hooker's great Elizabethan guide to Church Government and Discipline is therefore both a masterpiece of English prose and one of the bulwarks of the Established Church in England. Hooker projected eight books for the great work. The first four books of Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in I 593, Book V in 1 597. Hooker died in 1600 at the age of forty-six; the remaining three books were completed, though not revised, before his death. The manuscripts fell into careless or unscrupulous hands and were not published until long afterwards (1648 to and then only In mutilated form.