Bacon | Page 6

the unimportance of the matters about which
each contended with so much zeal. It is the confirmation, but also the
complement, and in some ways the correction of Hooker's
contemporary view of the quarrel which was threatening the life of the
English Church, and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and
so fair. For Hooker had to defend much that was indefensible: he had to
defend a great traditional system, just convulsed by a most tremendous
shock--a shock and alteration, as Bacon says, "the greatest and most

dangerous that can be in a State," in which old clews and habits and
rules were confused and all but lost; in which a frightful amount of
personal incapacity and worthlessness had, from sheer want of men,
risen to the high places of the Church; and in which force and violence,
sometimes of the most hateful kind, had come to be accepted as
ordinary instruments in the government of souls. Hooker felt too
strongly the unfairness, the folly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the
malignity of his opponents--he was too much alive to the wrongs
inflicted by them on his own side, and to the incredible absurdity of
their arguments--to do justice to what was only too real in the charges
and complaints of those opponents. But Bacon came from the very
heart of the Puritan camp. He had seen the inside of Puritanism--its best
as well as its worst side. He witnesses to the humility, the
conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, the hatred of sin and wrong,
of many of its preachers. He had heard, and heard with sympathy, all
that could be urged against the bishops' administration, and against a
system of legal oppression in the name of the Church. Where religious
elements were so confusedly mixed, and where each side had
apparently so much to urge on behalf of its claims, he saw the deep
mistake of loftily ignoring facts, and of want of patience and
forbearance with those who were scandalised at abuses, while the
abuses, in some cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit.
Towards the bishops and their policy, though his language is very
respectful, for the government was implicated, he is very severe. They
punish and restrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or
supply what was wanting; and theirs are "injuriæ
potentiorum"--"injuries come from them that have the upperhand." But
Hooker himself did not put his finger more truly and more surely on the
real mischief of the Puritan movement: on the immense outbreak in it
of unreasonable party spirit and visible personal ambition--"these are
the true successors of Diotrephes and not my lord bishops"--on the
gradual development of the Puritan theory till it came at last to claim a
supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant as that of the Papacy; on
the servile affectation of the fashions of Geneva and Strasburg; on the
poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan teaching--its inability to
satisfy the great questions which it raised in the soul, its unworthy
dealing with Scripture--"naked examples, conceited inferences, and

forced allusions, which mine into all certainty of religion"--"the word,
the bread of life, they toss up and down, they break it not;" on their
undervaluing of moral worth, if it did not speak in their
phraseology--"as they censure virtuous men by the names of civil and
moral, so do they censure men truly and godly wise, who see into the
vanity of their assertions, by the name of politiques, saying that their
wisdom is but carnal and savouring of man's brain." Bacon saw that the
Puritans were aiming at a tyranny which, if they established it, would
be more comprehensive, more searching, and more cruel than that of
the older systems; but he thought it a remote and improbable danger,
and that they might safely be tolerated for the work they did in
education and preaching, "because the work of exhortation doth chiefly
rest upon these men, and they have a zeal and hate of sin." But he ends
by warning them lest "that be true which one of their adversaries said,
that they have but two small wants--knowledge and love." One
complaint that he makes of them is a curious instance of the changes of
feeling, or at least of language, on moral subjects. He accuses them of
"having pronounced generally, and without difference, all untruths
unlawful," forgetful of the Egyptian midwives, and Rahab, and
Solomon, and even of Him "who, the more to touch the hearts of the
disciples with a holy dalliance, made as though he would have passed
Emmaus." He is thinking of their failure to apply a principle which was
characteristic of his mode of thought, that even a statement about a
virtue like veracity "hath limit as all things else have;" but it is odd