On bishops

Daily Reading for November 3 • Richard Hooker

As for us over whom Christ hath placed them [bishops] to be the chiefest guides and pastors of our souls, our common fault is that we look for much more in our governors than a tolerable sufficiency can yield, and bear much less than humanity and reason do require we should. Too much perfection over rigorously exacted in them, cannot but breed in us perpetual discontentment, and on both parts cause all things to be unpleasant.

From Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

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