Hooker was a quiet Oxford scholar and country parson who became, almost against his temperament, the defining voice of Elizabethan Anglicanism. His Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was written in answer to Puritan critics who held that nothing might be done in the Church which Scripture did not expressly command.
Hooker's reply was that Scripture is sufficient for salvation but was never meant to be a manual for every question, and that God also speaks through the reason he gave us and the accumulated judgement of the Church. That threefold appeal has shaped Anglican theology ever since. He wrote in long, patient, extraordinarily beautiful sentences, and he is one of the great prose stylists of the language as well as one of its theologians.