a mystery about it. The preface says,
"That this work as here published is genuine will so clearly appear by the
intrinsic marks it bears, that it will be but losing words and the reader's
time to take pains in giving him any other satisfaction." Surely fewer
words would have been lost if the prefator had said at once that the work
was from the manuscript preserved at Cambridge. Perhaps it was a mangled
copy clandestinely taken and interpreted. {141}

A BACONIAN CONTROVERSY.

Lord Bacon not the author of "The Christian Paradoxes," being a reprint
of "Memorials of Godliness and Christianity," by Herbert Palmer,
B.D.[297] With Introduction, Memoir, and Notes, by the Rev. Alexander
B. Grosart,[298] Kenross. (Private circulation, 1864).

I insert the above in this place on account of a slight connection with the
last. Bacon's Paradoxes,--so attributed--were first published as his in
some asserted "Remains," 1648.[299] They were admitted into his works in
1730, and remain there to this day. The title is "The Character of a
believing Christian, set forth in paradoxes and seeming contradictions."
The following is a specimen:

"He believes three to be one and one to be three; a father not to be older
than his son; a son to be equal with his father; and one proceeding from
both to be equal with both: he believes three persons in one nature, and
two natures in one person.... He believes the God of all grace to have been
angry with one that never offended Him; and that God that hates sin to be
reconciled to himself though sinning continually, and never making or being
able to make Him any satisfaction. He believes a most just God to have
punished a most just person, and to have justified himself, though a most
ungodly sinner. He believes himself freely pardoned, and yet a sufficient
satisfaction was made for him."

Who can doubt that if Bacon had written this it must have been wrong? Many
writers, especially on the {142} Continent, have taken him as sneering at
(Athanasian) Christianity right and left. Many Englishmen have taken him to
be quite in earnest, and to have produced a body of edifying doctrine. More
than a century ago the Paradoxes were published as a penny tract; and,
again, at the same price, in the _Penny Sunday Reader_, vol. vi, No. 148, a
few passages were omitted, as _too strong_. But all did not agree: in my
copy of Peter Shaw's [300] edition (vol. ii, p. 283) the Paradoxes have
been cut