ckly. But my
sons haste not to hearken to their mother's good counsel in time to
prevent." It seems clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother that
not only in the care of his health, but in his judgment on religious
matters, he meant to go his own way. Mr. Spedding thinks that she must
have had much influence on him; it seems more likely that he resented
her interference, and that the hard and narrow arrogance which she read
into the Gospel produced in him a strong reaction. Bacon was obsequious
to the tyranny of power, but he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny
of opinion; and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last thing
to which he was likely to submit. His mother would have wished him to
sit under Cartwright and Travers. The friend of his choice was the
Anglican preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works, and
whom he called his "inquisitor general;" and he was proud to sign
himself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him--the archbishop of
whom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous sentiment
in Greek, "that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved his own
glory more than Christ's."

Certainly, in the remarkable paper on _Controversies in the Church_
(1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as a Puritan. The paper is
an attempt to compose the controversy by pointing out the mistakes in
judgment, in temper, and in method on both sides. It is entirely unlike
what a Puritan would have written: it is too moderate, too tolerant, too
neutral, though like most essays of conciliation it is open to the
rejoinder from both sides--certainly from the Puritan--that it begs the
question by assuming 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 forc